How wonderful it must be to be so comfortable with a beta version of your software that you can demo it in front of thousands of SAS power users! That’s what my colleague, Jon Weisz, just did at SAS Global Forum’s Technology Connection. And he did so quite impressively, I might add.

Among other things, Jon showed off the mapping features coming up in JMP 9 by digging into SGF attendee data. Where in the world do you all come from? he asked. And then he showed us. He plugged attendee geographical data into the map of the world. The countries with the highest number of attendees showed up as a very dark blue. Those with fewer were a slightly lighter blue. And so on, so we could see how each country ranked. Those countries with zero representation showed up clear.

Not unexpectedly, most attendees came to Seattle from other states here in the US. But quite a few traveled from Europe, China and India. When Jon mentioned Denmark specifically because that country had such a large showing, members of that contingency shouted out.

Jon’s going to be looking at this data in more detail later today at a Super Demo on the Demo Room Floor. Perhaps we can dig a little deeper and see the distribution of attendees from within the US. I’m curious if having this event on the West Coast hindered travel by our East Coast users. We’ll see.